---

It is one of the strangest ironies of modernity that, under the pressure of technology, the world is becoming more and more "masculinized" and power obsessed, even as in the West, the male's sense of his own masculine identity weakens and grows more confused, and as homosexuality becomes more prominent. . . .

We see today not uncommonly an emasculated maleness on the one hand and a kind of two-dimensional, functional maleness on the other hand, increasingly patterned on the machine and displaying an ersatz machismo shaped by the ambient culture of violence. Parallel to this, the danger is great that modernity will continue to "defeminize" and harden the authentically feminine, as the negative expression of the feminist movement—feminism as ideology—has already managed to do. . . . What I call the "authentically feminine" inclines towards a sensitivity that is intuitive more than analytical, receptive more than aggressive, communal/familial more than individualist/independent. It remains to be seen whether a genuinely feminine influence, such as we can unquestionably discern in many social, educational, political, and humanitarian movements in our day, can survive and flourish in the harsh modern climate. . . .

—George Hobson
The Episcopal Church, Homosexuality, and the Context of Technology (2013)

---

— Family — Commonplaces #70 — Jan/Feb 2021 —